Product Strategy

“It’s easy to forget that StatPro won the award for best newcomer for its Revolution product only three years ago. Mature beyond its years, StatPro has rapidly established itself with investment managers by taking advantage of its relative youth to evolve solutions to tackle practical problems — something the company did to win this same category in 2010 for its liquidity risk and stress testing tool. And once again, its risk management initiative in 2014 — focusing this time on the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) — wins the category.”

Timothy Bourgoize Murray, Waters Technology

In the Product Strategy Review last year, we emphasised the development of a UCITS/AIFMD compliance module, explaining that, during 2013 and the early part of 2014, we spent some development resources in bringing this module to market. One year later, I am pleased to report that the compliance module contributed meaningfully to StatPro Revolution sales growth in 2014 and that it won the, award for ‘Best Buy-Side Risk Management Initiative over the last 12 months’ (awarded by Waters Technology). In 2015, compliance remains one of our key sales drivers, as the European hedge fund regulation, AIFMD, remains a hot topic for many of our clients and prospects and we expect sales traction to continue.

In addition to compliance, StatPro Revolution development has significantly enhanced two key functional areas:

Equity performance attribution analysis: we have implemented a number of improvements that align functional breadth to our top clients requirements, related to equity portfolios;

Reporting/data extraction: we improved the usability of StatPro Revolution’s reporting and data extraction facility, with the objective of embedding them inside our clients’ workflow.

During 2015, we will be focusing our StatPro Revolution development resources on our risk offering, with two main commercial objectives:

Bridging the gap with StatPro Seven functionality to allow existing clients to migrate smoothly to the new cloud platform;

Adding advanced features, such as risk factor decomposition, to enlarge the appeal of our risk offering to a wider audience, which includes not only middle office users, but also extends to front office practitioners.

Also during 2015, we will increase the scalability of StatPro Revolution, leveraging leading-edge database technology and cutting the marginal cost of storage and calculation. This investment is geared towards managing the largefixed income benchmarks at an effective cost for our clients, whilst generating an appropriate margin.

Therefore, whereas 2014 might be categorised as the year of Equity Attribution and compliance, 2015 will be the year for Risk. We expect 2016 to be the year for Fixed-Income Attribution, where we will eliminate any remaining functional gaps between StatPro Seven and StatPro Revolution. The ongoing investments in scalable technology are necessary to achieve the planned fixed-income
developments in 2016.

Looking beyond 2015, integrating the performance module within the StatPro Revolution platform, we will be able to migrate every portfolio from the ‘old analytics’ platform to the ‘new world’. During 2014, we started transferring the first equity portfolios. Developments in 2015 will empower clients to move their risk processes to StatPro Revolution. The development efforts in 2016 will complete the functional scope and accelerate the portfolio migration process.

StatPro Revolution’s performance module

2014 has also seen significant improvements in the performance module within StatPro Revolution (formerly known as StatPro R+), with the completion of key deliverables for performance computation and the release of a beta version. We are currently working on three key development streams:

Engaging with our internal client teams to test the system against detailed client day-to-day requirements, refining the product and smoothing the client experience;

Completing the development of security-level transactional based performance computation engines; and

Integrating the performance module within StatPro Revolution to deliver a single user experience for the clients that will use both products.

We expect to have further beta releases available to clients during the course of 2015 and we are synchronising development with the StatPro Revolution roadmap to allow our StatPro Seven clients to plan and begin the migration of their operations later in 2015 and beyond.

Dario Cintioli Managing Director 12 March 2015

“Partnering with StatPro Revolution to offer the NASDAQ Global Index Family is an exciting opportunity for both companies that creates unsurpassed value for the buy-side community. The combination of StatPro’s cloud based analytics platform and NASDAQ’s deep global index content enables investment managers of all sizes to conduct sophisticated portfolio attribution analysis at an Affordable price.”